How to manage ticket status by release branch

Question

In our work we typically deal with multiple product versions in parallel. One version may already be deployed, another about to be released, and a third be in development.

When a new defect is reported, it may be "deferred" for the upcoming release, but "in progress" (or even "done") for the development branch.

What is the best way to reflect such a workflow in jira ? Can a ticket have multiple states, depending on the target release ? Or would you advise for keeping target-branch specific clones of the ticket ?

Bill Sheboy · Answer

You are correct: that functionality does not exist for the existing features.

A workaround could be adding custom fields specifically to record deferred versions, etc.

Before doing that I recommend pausing to discuss with the team: what would we do if we already had that information today?  How would we act differently?

Knowing that may help your team decide how to mitigate / solve this need.

Stefan Seefeld · Answer

But that's the thing: there is no "until" ! The ticket *is* fixed for a given version (on a given branch), but still needs to be marked "deferred" for another. In other words, what I'm looking for is to have contextual states, i.e. "deferred for release A" *and* "done for release B".

I don't think the "fix version" is providing enough information. Consider for example a case where the bug was found in version 1, is fixed in version 3, and now there is a formal discussion on whether to backport the fix to version 2 or not.

Bill Sheboy · Answer

For "deferred" you could just clear the Fix Version field until the work is built / scheduled for delivery.  And...a Label value could be added to indicate the "deferred" state for tracking purposes.